Living Jewish: Reforesting Hope in the Heart of Mexico

I came to Mexico to escape burnout. I wasn’t having a crisis of faith, but I needed my faith restored. I wanted to find extraordinary people doing extraordinary things — to be reminded that the world is still filled with hope, light, and beauty. My core identity is Jewish, and I see the world through the lens of Torah values. By an incredible series of fortunate events, I discovered two extraordinary Jews, deep in the heart of Mexico, who are Living Jewish — embodying Torah values not as belief, but as daily practice. This is their story.

Living Jewish Means Guardianship of the Earth

“God placed the human in the garden to work it and to guard it.” — Genesis 2:15  

The Torah’s first mandate was ecological: to become stewards.   

Just beyond the cobblestone streets of San Miguel de Allende — a jewel-toned city known for its art, architecture, and golden light — there’s a place that feels less like a farm and more like a living prayer. It’s a modern-day Gan Eden, a Garden of Eden.

Olive trees rustle beside pomegranate groves. Rainwater flows gently through stone-carved canals. Native plants thrive in carefully terraced soil. Chickens cluck, koi ripple and medicinal herbs line the garden beds.

This is the Tikkun Eco Center. And at the heart of it is a sacred partnership: a love story rooted in devotion to the Earth.

From the moment Ben Zion Ptashnik first met Victoria Collier 15 years ago, they felt an ancient knowing, a bond that transcended time. They have known each other not just in this life, but across many lifetimes.

They move through life in step. They pause for each other’s words. They finish each other’s thoughts. They gaze at one another not just with affection, but with purpose.

Together, they are doing what Torah commands: repairing the world. I was mesmerized, witnessing love and purpose intertwined.

A visit to Tikkun fills the heart. Walk the land. See the trees. Sit in the quiet of the orchard with Ben and Victoria. You’ll understand why this place is more than a seven-acre food forest and regeneration project. It’s a blessing.

More than anything, Ben Zion and Victoria are farmers of hope. Hope for a future free from hatred, greed, violence and exploitation — a future rooted in conservation and regeneration. 

Located on the semi-arid high plateau of central Mexico, in a small campesino village, Tikkun is fully off-grid. Solar panels and a wind turbine power the buildings and grounds, and drive irrigation pumps. Batteries power computers and lights at night. Rain is captured and stored using ancient methods — ponds, underground cisterns, swales and terraces. Rainwater is distributed with precision-gardens are nourished with Israeli invented drip irrigation. 

Water lilies and cat-tail roots filter the reservoirs, farm hands build a new tree nursery. Rainwater captured in fish ponds fertilizes the soil, and chickens feed on invasive grasshoppers. Everything works in sacred harmony. 

One can meditate in the “Tikkun Peace Forest,” dedicated after Oct. 7 to the children of Israel and Gaza. This small forest is designed in the shape of the Kabbalah Tree of Life mandala, with its 10 Sefirot. The forest contains dozens of indigenous ceremonial and medicinal trees and plants, mostly planted by visiting school children.

Ben Zion — the Israeli-born son of Holocaust survivors and a former Vermont State Senator — has spent his life building: legislative coalitions, international fair-trade companies, environmental campaigns, wind generators and solar systems across Mexico. Though self-taught in many areas, he has a deep academic background in political science, ecology and natural resource management. As a child growing up in Yafo, and later in Tel Aviv, he often visited cousins in kibbutzim. 

For his senior project at Goddard College, Vermont, he organized a conference for over 100 second-generation children of survivors. They came from all over the U.S. — from as far away as Atlanta, Philadelphia and from Boston, New York and Chicago. They spoke about their parents, antisemitism and the possibility of a return to fascism.

After selling Via Vermont, his import-export business, to a Fortune 500 company, Ben founded the Stopnitz Family Fund — named for his parents’ village in Poland, a town that lost 90% of its Jewish population in the Nazi camps — over 3,000 men, women and children. Initially focused on human rights and Holocaust education, the Fund eventually expanded to address democracy, civil rights, and the climate crisis — what Ben and Victoria call “a slow-moving holocaust or extinction for so many earth-species, and perhaps of humanity itself.” 

The Stopnitz Fund initially funded the Tikkun Center for Ecological Sustainability in 2008, after Ben decided to quit the Vermont Senate, and came to Mexico to pioneer solar and wind energy. 

From his father and grandfather, Ben-Zion inherited a legacy of service and moral courage. Ben speaks of his carpenter grandfather Ben-Zion, who disappeared in the Holocaust, a righteous man who ran around Stopnitz every Friday afternoon collecting zlotys to buy challah for the poor families and widows. And he reverently talks about his father Ezekiel’s life examples:

“My father searched for meaning in service,” Ben told me. 

After he found that most of his family had perished in the death camps, he smuggled into Israel and joined the Haganah. And he dedicated himself to his community of survivors, helping start and manage the Stopnitzer Society for survivors. Even in Buchenwald, during the depths of the Holocaust, my father and his two brothers — carpenters in the slave labor camps — built secret doors and bunkers in the workers’ barracks to hide sick inmates who couldn’t work, lest they be shot. In the Lodz Ghetto, he risked his life climbing through barbed wire at night to smuggle food from nearby farms.” 

“Our time on Earth must have consequences — that’s what he taught me. He believed in what Buddhists might call Karma. It’s not enough to survive or accumulate wealth. He always reminded me to be a mensch — that you can’t take it with you when you die.” 

Both Ben and Victoria believe that their mission as Jews, especially those who understand suffering — whose families were so brutally enslaved and murdered — is to honor the memory of those who died: to serve, to heal, to repair, and to leave the Earth spiritually and ecologically stronger than we found it — for generations to come.” 

Victoria, originally from Los Angeles, trained in permaculture and steeped in social justice, tends to the seed collection and library, the chickens, the horses and other rescued animals. She focuses on the garden beds, and human relationships.

A gifted artist, musician, and nonprofit leader, she believes that healing the Earth begins with reverence — for water, for soil, for soul. She found farming transcending when her parents decided to move to a farm in her teenage years, and she first grew her own garden.

“Every act of planting a seed or restoration of the earth is an act of love,” she says. “When a child plants a tree, it awakens something ancient — a memory that we belong to the Earth, not the other way around.”

 Victoria and Ben rarely quote Torah — but they live it. Through shmirat ha’adamah (guardianship of Earth), bal tashchit (prohibition against waste), and tikkun olam (repairing the world), not as slogans, but as practice. One plant, one person, one village at a time.

Living Jewish Means Restoring What Was Lost

San Miguel, in the State of Guanajuato, once blanketed in oak and encino forests, was scarred by colonial mining and smelting of silver, and aquifer depletion by agribusiness. Today, the northern Mexican desert creeps closer to San Miguel every year. Ben Zion and Victoria are building a barrier — not of walls, but of trees.

Their vision: a green belt around San Miguel de Allende. A living defense system of native trees, rainwater reservoirs and watershed restoration to reverse desertification. They focus on communities where economic sustainability is rapidly fading for local farm families.  

They’ve especially mapped out denuded forests in communal ejidos — collective farms born of Mexico’s land reform, very much like the Israeli moshav cooperatives — and partnered with local experts and campesinos to reforest where it’s most urgently needed. 

Their goal: rebuild indigenous abandoned reservoirs, propagate and plant 1 million trees, in 10 years. Not in theory — in water capturing projects, community reforestation and soil regeneration. Like pioneer kibbutzniks, in the Negev and in the Galil.

They know this cannot be an “expat-led” initiative. So they’ve built a local team of ecologists, educators, and organizers. What began with a shovel and a dream has become a scalable model for ecological restoration. One of the most powerful parts of their work is hosting schoolchildren and university students — hundreds of them — to visit, learn and plant trees. These moments ignite something lasting: wonder, responsibility, and a deep sense of belonging to the land. 

Living Jewish Means Creating a Culture of Repair and Feeding the Hungry

During the darkest days of COVID, when San Miguel and the U.S. were in lockdown, two nearby villages were cut off from food and income. Ben built irrigation systems and Victoria grew five acres of blue corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, greens, chilis, broccoli, and cilantro — and gave it all away. 

They met with village leaders to identify the most vulnerable — the elderly, single mothers, those without pensions. The elected “delegadas” made lists. No one in need was left behind. 

This is Torah in action:

“You shall open your hand to your neighbor, to your poor and to your needy in your land.” — Deuteronomy 15:11

As the crisis deepened, Victoria began helping families build home gardens. But the local well had begun to dry up, and water was being rationed.

So they used their savings — all of it — to rent an excavator and five trucks to restore the village’s 200-year-old abandoned rainwater reservoir. They redistributed rich silt soil to nearby farms, terraced the surrounding hills, and planted hundreds of trees with the community.

Six months later, the dam held 25 million liters of rainwater. Today, after 10 years of going dry every winter it holds water year-round. A new distribution system is underway to bring water directly to homes. And a second reservoir project in the ejido community of Los Torres is now being forested.

Tikkun is also creating jobs in rural communities. This spring Tikkun hired 10 ejidatarios to build stone-walled terraces, and a tree nursery in a rural ejido. Next they plan to help start a community garden at the primary school.  

Victoria speaks of a wedding tradition in India, where guests give trees to the new couple — symbols of life, rootedness, and responsibility. “That’s the culture we hope to see built here,” Victoria told me. “Where bringing a tree as a gift is sacred. Where restoration is a way of life.”

It reminded me of the old JNF pushke box from my childhood, where planting a tree in Israel marked births, losses, and celebrations. It isn’t just about trees. It’s about belonging.

Ben Zion and Victoria are building that same tradition — one that transcends borders but remains deeply grounded in Torah.

A New Chapter: Growing the Dream 

With over 3,000 trees and cacti already planted, and two reservoir restorations under their belt, Ben and Victoria’s dream is scaling up. Tikkun is now supported by a number of member-funders, small family funds, and a five-year foundation grant. The new funding from private foundations has enabled them to hire local experts, build new nurseries, fund watershed restoration, and launch a 10-year regional reforestation effort.

Their vision:

• One million indigenous plants and trees native to the Guanajuato region propagated and planted

• Dozens of restored local watersheds and reservoirs

• Sustainable employment for rural communities

• Development of sustainable regenerative agriculture 

• A transformed ecological future for Central Mexico

Not all at once. Not by one NGO like Tikkun, not one funder. But by a constellation of people who believe, as they do, that we can heal what’s been broken. That stewardship is sacred. That Living Jewish means showing up with purpose and doing good.

Come visit. Come plant. Come share and give. Living Jewish is not just about tradition — it is about embodying our values in the world. It is a vision of Tikkun Olam. It is about choosing to be part of the repair.

https://www.tikkunsanmiguel.mx/ 

Audrey Jacobs is a Jewish communal leader, strategic advisor, and TEDx curator, and the mother of three grown sons.